Editor's Note: For the next several months, we will carry brief summaries of proposed legislation likely to be of interest to our readers. Limited space prohibits us from addressing all such legislation this month.

Lloyd Fillion

Every year Massachusetts taxpayers spend tens of thousands of dollars training unemployed people to enter the workforce; yet, the Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) system prohibits many of those trainees from making use of the skills the taxpayers have provided. This approach, besides wasting scarce revenue, creates a nearly unbreakable barrier to housing, employment, education, and credit for ex-offenders, who therefore cannot re-enter society as productive and law- abiding citizens.

The criminal record for former prisoners, available to nearly all employers, contains not only convictions, but also arrests and other infractions that have not resulted in a conviction, or even in a trial. Erroneous arrests, searches, and interviews are among the information swept up and placed on an individual's CORI .

Several legislators working with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute are filing legislation to limit the burden that CORI places on both offenders and the wrongfully-indicted, as well as the taxpayers. Senator Dianne Wilkerson (D, Suffolk) and Representative Ruth Balser (D, Middlesex) have introduced legislation ("Relative to Distribution and Use of Criminal Offender Record Information") to restrict employers' and housing authorities' access to the part of an applicant's CORI that addresses convictions and pending cases. Separate legislation ("Accelerating the Sealing of Non-Conviction Criminal Offender Record Information") sponsored by Balser and Wilkerson would permanently require any court records in a case where the disposition is favorable to the defendant to be sealed within six months of the case's conclusion. Similar legislation ("Clarifying the Sealing of Non-Conviction Criminal Offender Record Information") by Representative Byron Rushing (D, Suffolk) would require that criminal charges resulting in "no bill" by the grand jury are automatically sealed, and that an acquittal or equivalent result may be immediately sealed on a defendant's petition.

The text of the aforementioned bills, as well as more complete summaries of them, are posted on our website.

Lloyd Fillion

Representative Michael Festa (D, 32nd Middlesex) has introduced a new entencing guidelines bill, House Docket no. 3326. This bill is a revision of H2750, one of the sev-eral sentencing guideline bills under consideration last year. (For a description of that bill, and a full description of the mechanics of sentencing guidelines, please go to our website. The description below will refer to certain aspects which are explained in the article link below. See also the July, 2004 Vol.1 #7 issue of our newsletter. This article attempts to highlight the major changes.

This new bill preserves the general outline of H2750. All crimes are placed on a grid with five columns for criminal histories and nine rows for seriousness levels. The col-umns describe the criminal history of groups of offenders. For example, first-time offend-ers are placed in "criminal history group" column one, while several offenses of various seriousness levels would place an offender in any of the adjacent four columns, with the last column being reserved for serious violent offenders. The severity of a sentence in- creases for individuals with increasingly lengthy criminal histories. Each of the approxi-mately 1400 offenses in the state's "master crime list" is assigned a row, or "offense se- riousness level," with the severity of sentence increasing as the level or seriousness of the crime increases. The confluence of the five columns and nine rows produces 45 grid cells, each with a minimum-to-maximum range of penalty therein.

From time to time, articles written by either current or former prisoners or by family and friends of prisoners come to the attention of the board of the CJPC, and are deemed worthy of a wider audience. These articles represent the singular experiences and/or the views of the authors, and while the CJPC has no ability to verify the contents, the organization only publishes those pieces in which it has a high level of confidence.

A Mother's Experience with a Prison Health System
Susan Huskins

In late September 2002, my son Michael, who was incarcerated in Billerica, became very sick. A corrections officer called at 6:30 on a Friday night to give me the news. He said that Michael was in intensive care at Shattuck Hospital with pancreatitis, but that I shouldn't worry; it wasn't very serious. I asked him if it wasn't serious, why Michael was in intensive care. He didn't have an answer, but he told me if I wanted to visit, I would have to clear it through the jail on Monday.

I thought I would have to go through the weekend not knowing anything about my son's condition, but Michael himself called me on Sunday. They had transferred him to Brigham and Women's because Shattuck did not have the facilities to treat him. He sounded terrible, but I still couldn't visit him until I arranged it through the prison, which I did the next morning. My mother and I went to the hospital that night.

I was told that I would have to call the jail every time I wanted to go to visit Michael, but after making a number of appointments, a Lieutenant told me I didn't have to call anymore; I could go whenever I wanted. Later, I found out from people who knew Michael why he had been so permissive. The word around Billerica was that my son wasn't going to make it.

The Changing Face of Prison
Douglas P. Wilson

The face of penal institutions is changing. The era of moderate sentences and post-incarceration supervision has been replaced by long sentences with little or no parole. The goal of rehabilitation has been replaced by human warehousing.

Moreover, the demographics of prisons have shifted over the past few decades. Many facilities now resemble juvenile detention centers, but with all the cruel realities of the traditional penal system. In most state prisons, it's reported that the under-18 population segment has experienced the greatest growth rate "with the likelihood of incarceration relative to arrest increasing in almost every category." The rate of juveniles admitted into prisons has risen 104% from 1995 to 1997; sixteen year-old offenders have in-creased 16.66%, while fifteen year-olds in prison have jumped 50%.

Douglas Wilson is an undergraduate student at Boston University, a member of the Alpha Sigma Lambda Honor Society, and has an ATM-Gold in public speaking from Toast- masters International. At sixteen, Wilson was sentenced to 20 years for manslaughter. He is an aspiring freelance writer on social issues. He is currently at Norfolk Prison, P.O. Box 73, Norfolk, MA 02056.